1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for editing a music score, and more particularly to such an apparatus and a method processing a music score data set including information to display a music score in musical notation, a performance data set including information to perform a piece of music as defined by the music score, and an intermediate data set including information to mediate between the music score data set and the performance data set and to reflect edition of the music score data set into the performance data set, so that the performance data set is efficiently composed reflecting the edition on to the music score data set.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There has conventionally been known in the art an apparatus of a data processing type which displays a music score on the display screen based on music score data and prints the music score on paper in the style exhibited on the screen. In such an apparatus, icons of various kinds of notes and of various kinds of musical signs (or symbols) are to be arbitrarily inputted using an input device such as a keyboard utilizing the data processing technology.
There has also been known in the art an apparatus of a data processing type which converts the music score data for screen display into performance data for driving a tone generating module such as a MIDI apparatus to perform music. A music score contains icons or symbols of various notes and various other signs located at respective determined positions on the five-line staves, and the music score data for exhibiting a visual image of a music score on the display screen contains display position data, note type data and sign type data to place the note symbol images and various sign symbol images at the respective proper positions on the screen. The apparatus, therefore, builds performance data from the music score data by utilizing such various data elements in the music score data.
The music score data, however, are data for the purpose of displaying musical notations on a screen plane and, therefore, do not contain data concerning the progression of time. For this reason, the production of performance data from music score data inevitably requires the formation of a whole performance data covering from the top through to the tail of the score data. In case a portion or portions of the score data is or are edited, the conversion from the score data into the performance data will necessitates complete amendment of the performance data from its beginning to end corresponding to the whole length of the partly edited score data, and not a partial amendment of the edited performance data. This makes the performance data producing work after the score edition inefficient, and requires much time after the edition of the music score data.